Why: Based on the success of and interest in last year's Chatbots 3.0 conference, we have organized a follow-up Chatbots conference in the same location in Philadelphia. We have assembled an impressive group of speakers covering a range of topics including chat bot technology, business, legal issues and applications. Chatbots 3.x has established a reputation for providing the highest quality presentations among all conferences in our industry. Come to the Chatbots 3.1 conference to meet the top experts in our community. Interact, ask questions, and join us for an informative day reviewing the latest developments in chat bot technology.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

We found an interesting and simple demo of speech recognition in HTML5 in this presentation on slide 25. To make the demo work with ALICE and Pandorabots, we had to make only a slight change to our custom HTML input files.

Note: The demo uses the Google Speech API. At the time of this writing, not all browsers yet support this HTML5 feature. We have found it works in Google Chrome. Furthermore, we have only tested it successfully with Windows 7.

There are a couple of "tricks" you need to know to test the speech API:

1. Click on the little mic icon to begin speaking. The speech API will detect when you have finished speaking and, when it has finished processing, will display the text it detected in the text area.

2. If you are satisfied with what the speech API detected, click the "Say" button to transmit it to the bot.

The quality of the speech recognition may not seem very high. There are a number of factors that affect the accuracy of speech recognition: the quality of the microphone, background noise, the accent of the speaker, the type of sound card on your computer and so on. Pandorabots has no control over the Google voice recognition software, but the results should be comparable to using the Google voice API with any other application.

Enabling Chrome Voice API

The Chrome voice recognition API may not be enabled by default. Follow these steps to create a shortcut to Chrome with voice recognition enabled.

1. Create a desktop shortcut to Google chrome with copy and paste. (You may also want to rename this shortcut something like "Chrome Voice").

2. Right click on the shortcut and select "Properties"

3. On the Shortcut tab, modify the Target field to include the flag "--enable-speech-input". For example if the Target was originally C:\Users\drwallace\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe

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About Dr. Richard Wallace

Dr. Richard S. Wallace formed the ALICE A. I. Foundation in 2001 to promote the development and adoption of Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) and ALICE free software. Dr. Wallace has a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon.